Twitter embroiled in Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal

Twitter sold data access to a researcher associated with the consulting firm at the centre of the ongoing Facebook data scandal, it has emerged.

Aleksandr Kogan, who created a personality quiz used by Cambridge Analytica to gather information on Facebook users, was also granted access to “large-scale public Twitter data, covering months of posts, for one day in 2015”, Bloomberg reports.

In a statement to the news site, Twitter said Kogan’s commercial enterprise, Global Science Research (GSR), had been given “one-time” access to “a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015.”

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“Based on the recent reports, we conducted our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter”, added the social media site, which charges firms to collect tweets “en masse”.

“At first glance, this doesn’t appear to be a major privacy issue, since tweets and Twitter profiles don’t share much about you outside of what you wrote”, says Engadget.

The relatively short period for which GSR had access to the data also suggests it hadn’t been “venturing outside the official boundaries” as it did with Facebook, the tech site says.

For Facebook, GSR developed an app called “This is your digital life” in order to harvest the personal information of those using the social media platform, which it later sold to Cambridge Analytica.

However, Kogan has “insisted” that the data it gathered from Twitter had only been used to build “brand reports” and “survey extender tools”, which is in line with the social media firm’s policies, The Daily Telegraph reports.